1993 seems very unlikely?
I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
151–160 of 229 posts
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#152Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…
> Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer.
Lego MindStorms! There's a lab at my local university filled with Lego and basic robot sensors/actuators. Schools and other community clubs can book one-time or regular workshops.
What fascinates me the most is the adaptability to the students' abilities. Young students can do "block based programming", telling the robot what to do with very simple command blocks that connect to each other. With rising profession, advanced blocks can be made available that are more powerful, resembling software control structures. New sensors can be used and robots are built by the students themselves instead of prebuilt. At some point, you can ditch the graphical block based programming and show the generated Java code and introduce the students to basic software development.
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
`my_number & 1 == 0` works.
JavaScript does have bitwise operators. Something I was surprised by was that numbers are stored as 64 bit while all of the bitwise operators operate on 32 but numbers. This means that every operation results in a number conversion first.
Not just 64 bit. 64 bit floating point. You can't just get the "low bit". You need to take the exponent into account to figure out which bit of the mantissa to grab. It's intrinsically more computationally difficult than is-odd on a real integer.
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#154Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…
I took a summer class in C++ in middle school and ditched programming for probably 5 years before coming back when i learned I could make games with my TI calculator :)
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sort of opaqueness: Many people hail it as the next big thing since sliced bread, but when you actually spend the effort digging in you realize its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion. Give me some bitcoin and i would not know what to do with them except changing them back into money.
> its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access to and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fashion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? The list of use cases for that capability is n…
What you are describing is a signature, and i use gpg --sign for that.
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#156Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…
> Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. I can't answer that for a 13 year old, but I can for an 8 year old. Minecraft. The elaborate stuff my daughter built at that age is way more gratifying than anything I could have built as an 8 year old.
My then-5yo built rollercoasters single handed. I helped embellish it with trigger driven fireworks and other stuff for some combo quality time and screen time. Minecraft is such a perfect game for little kids and it works "offline" pretty well.
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#157Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…
My first experience of programming was walking up to an Apple II in grade school (this was in the 2000s, those were some old machines) and punching in code listing from a book. The machines didn't do anything when you powered them on, just waited for you to enter code or commands. It was so simple, and it just begged you to start writing programs.
Now people talk about getting their kids started with programming, and end up talking about raspberry pis and Linux distros and whatnot. Granted the tools now are so much more powerful, and a determined kid can write a best selling iPhone app, but there's something wonderful about a machine that shows up to you as a blank slate, awaiting instruction.
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or so…
It's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capable. There are free services like Wix and Glitch that let you build a webpage and then mess with the HTML, no domain name needed. The problem of warez is certainly no worse than it was 30 years ago, and there are much better tools to address it. A simple stora…
Signing up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work.
It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#159I created podcastbunker.com in 2004. In 2005 it was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 50 coolest web sites. You can look it up if you want. I was a f*king webmaster:-)
Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still just use HTML.
This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or so…
Huh? Just use neocities.org. Even has a built-in editor on the site.